{"id":8,"date":"2005-01-10T11:07:31","date_gmt":"2005-01-10T11:07:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.standards-schmandards.com\/2005\/browsing-habits\/"},"modified":"2015-04-21T20:26:10","modified_gmt":"2015-04-21T18:26:10","slug":"browsing-habits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.standards-schmandards.com\/2005\/browsing-habits\/","title":{"rendered":"Browsing habits of screen reader users"},"content":{"rendered":"
A while ago I read the article “Observing Users Who Listen to Web Sites<\/a>“. In that article the authors report that visually impaired users scan web pages with their ears instead of reading them top to bottom. This may not come as a surprise to you if you read Jakob Nielsen’s “How Users Read on the Web<\/a>” back in 1997. Recently I have had the opportunity to study a number of screen reader users and my observations are similar.<\/p>\n This article is also available in Polish<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Why do we scan instead of read? Steven Krug, author of the usability book Don’t Make Me Think<\/a> talks about users being in a hurry and how users satisfice<\/a> when browsing for information. This means that we quickly look for and choose the first reasonable option and not necessarily the best one.<\/p>\n If you have employed a decent graphics designer chances are that he\/she has used typography, background colors and images to make it easy for sighted users to find the information they want quickly. Sighted users use the graphical layout of a page to get an idea of areas of importance and can thereby make unconscious decisions to focus their attention to specific items.<\/p>\n Early screen readers pretty much created a long linear version of a web page. Imagine of you quickly had to get an overview of a movie on a VHS tape but your VCR had no forward or rewind buttons. You would have no option but to watch the movie from the beginning to the end. Fortunately, modern screen readers have features that can break apart the long linear version into different views based on the semantic markup of the information in the web page. The users I observed were mainly using the following features of their screen reader (Jaws) when scanning web pages:<\/p>\n These features where used together with the linear representation of the page. A typical user scenario would be:<\/p>\n Advanced users crank up the speed of the voice to make this type of page scanning faster.<\/p>\n You can probably see where this is heading. Imagine if the web page has no heading markup. In that case the list of headings will be empty and the user is left to the linear representation of the page. The same goes for page links. If the link text is poorly written it is difficult to get any information from the list of links dialog. “But”, you say, “I am using the title attribute to provide a proper link text”. Unfortunately Jaws does not make use of the title attribute with the default settings. Just like with ordinary browsers, many users do not know how to change this setting.<\/p>\n So, here are some suggestions you can use to improve the browsing experience for visually impaired users:<\/p>\n The best way to test your website is of course to get a copy of Jaws and listen to how it sounds. This takes a lot of time. If you haven’t installed Fangs, the screen reader emulator<\/a>, yet I suggest you do so now. Version 0.80 now has basic functionality for the list of links and the list of headings. Does your website work? I know I have some things to fix.<\/p>\nPages are scanned, not read word by word<\/h2>\n
How do you scan with your ears?<\/h2>\n
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Implications for html coders<\/h2>\n
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How to check your website with Fangs<\/h2>\n
References<\/h2>\n